“If your highness pleases,” says I, “Major Sapten is right. Every moment I continue in Strackenz is dangerous, for both of us, but especially for you. I must go, and quickly. Believe me, it is for the best. And as the major has remarked, there is no debt.”

Wasn’t there, though! I kept my face smooth, but underneath I was beginning to smart with hurt and anger. I hadn’t asked to be embroiled in the politics of their tin-pot little duchy, but I had been bloody near killed more times than I could count, cut and wounded and half drowned, scared out of my wits—and all I was getting at the end of it was the sneers of Sapten and the handshake of his blasted highness. Ten minutes before I had been thankful to come out with a whole skin, but suddenly now I felt full of spite and anger towards them.

There was a bit of mumbling and grumbling, but it was all hypocrisy; indeed, I don’t doubt that if Carl Gustaf had been given an hour or two longer to recover from the scare he had had, and his consequent gratitude to me, he would have been ready to listen to a suggestion from Sapten that I should be slipped back down the pipe for a second time—with my hands tied this time. After all, his face was like mine, so his character might be, too.

For the moment, though, he had the grace to look troubled; he probably thought he owed it to his princely dignity to do something for me. But he managed to fight it down—they usually do—and the upshot of it was that they agreed that I should ride out as quickly as possible. They would stay where they were for the night, so that his highness could rest and take counsel, and there was a broad hint that I had better be over the frontier by morning. Grundvig seemed the only one who was unhappy about my sudden dismissal; he was an odd one, that, and I gathered from what he said that he alone had come round to the view that I was more sinned against than sinning. He actually seemed rather sorry for me, and he was the one who eventually escorted me up from that dungeon, and ordered a horse to be found, and stood with me in the castle gateway while they went to the mainland for it.

“I am a father, too, you see,” says he, pacing up and down. “I understand what it must mean to a man, when his loved ones are torn from him, and used as hostages against him. Who knows? I, too, might have acted as you did. I trust I should have behaved as bravely when the time came.”